Women Who Belong

A Place to Belong: Letters from Catholic Women explores what it means to be a woman of faith today. Edited by Corynne Staresinic, the founder of the nonprofit The Catholic Woman, this stunning anthology of twenty-five deeply personal letters, wisdom from women saints, reflection questions, art, photography, and prayers will inspire you to live your femininity along your own unique life path as you find--and provide for others--a place to belong.

Why bother to invert the history of Western women? We must do so to fight an insidious, fallacious assumption that patriarchy is universal and eternal, and we must do so to nullify the amnesic effects of Domesticity’s potent semantics. We must resist this two-pronged attack that reduces women to powerless incubators. When we invert the patriarchal hegemony and center the ordinary woman as empowered owner and hostess to her life story, we find women, rich and poor, who chose when, where, how and if they would cooperate with the rules of patriarchy, rules often supported by other women. Our heroines demanded the rights due them for properly occupying their societal place in the home, in church or on the street corner. We find this to be consistent across time and space. We start in the seventeenth century with European women on three continents: Europe, North Africa and North America. We present Isabel de Jésus, Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston, and soldiers’ wives, widows and femes sole of the Tangier and Gibraltar garrisons. Here we have women of different religions, language groups and social classes, and they all used patriarchal laws to protect their rights. We move across time to the turn of the twentieth century in Ireland, Puerto Rico and the United States where we find women as wives of rich men in Toledo’s Woman Suffrage Association, as middle class professionals in the civilizing missions of the Christian Church in Puerto Rico, the magdalen homes of Ireland, and the eugenics movement in the US, and as sex workers serving tradesmen in Ireland. Again, these women manipulated the legal systems and demanded the powers due them from legislators, mission boards, and judges. The microhistories of women in this volume adulterate the assumption of universal and eternal patriarchy. As these women claimed the rights due them for properly occupying their prescribed social roles, they also created alliances with men who partnered with them in their feminist projects. Why should we invert Women’s history with microhistory? We must do so to liberate men and women from fallacious, patriarchal oppression.

The long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations. In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, the expansion into Cambodia, and the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as a historian and a witness of the times. What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice. Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don’t Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war. ‘A riveting read with much to say about the nature of war and the different ways men and women correspondents cover it. Frank, fast-paced, often enraging, You Don’t Belong Here speaks to the distance travelled and the journey still ahead.’ —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March, former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent ‘Riveting, powerful and transformative, Elizabeth Becker’s You Don’t Belong Here tells the stories of three astonishing women. This is a timely and brilliant work from one of our most extraordinary war correspondents.’ —Madeleine Thien, Booker Prize finalist and author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The debate rages! Do women belong in vocational pulpit leadership? What does the Bible say? Three things distinguish this book's argument. First, the author's passion; pages sizzle, thanks to decades of detractor abuse. Second, out of loyalty to the Scriptures she rejects traditional feminist arguments. Third, her intellectual honesty: she was willing to abandon her calling if the Bible proved her wrong. You will love her adept use of Hebrew and Greek! This book divides into four parts. Part One details her personal journey; we learn the energy driving her research. In Part Two, she exposes the sordid roots of detractor's arguments, and then treats us to an in-depth analysis of the four Biblical arguments they claim proves their case. In Part Three, she traces strategic roles women have enjoyed from Eve to the twenty-first century, including fascinating stories of Reformation leaders (publicly opposed to women in leadership) placing women in critical leadership/preaching roles. In Part Four, with a twist, she summarizes the argument every detractor should hear: Women Belong in Ministry Leadership!

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT FEMALE EMPOWERMENT, MATRIARCHY, FEMALE SUPERIORITY-WHY PATRIARCHY IS WRONG & WHY WOMEN MUST TAKE OVER THE FAMILY & THE WORLD-A SMALL PERCENT OF MEN TOOK OVER THE WORLD BY FORCE, VIOLENCE & MURDER & HAVE KEPT THE MAJORITY-MALE, FEMALE & ANIMALS, UNDER CONTROL THROUGH UNJUST WARS, UNJUST LAWS, INTIMIDATION & LIES-LEADING GENETICIST DR. BRYAN SYKES SAID HUMAN MALES ARE A 'GENETIC MODIFICATION THAT DID NOT WORK' & THEREFORE NATURE IS REMOVING THEM-HUMAN MALE EXTINCTION IS INEVITABLE-THE PICTURES ARE EXCITING, MUCH NUDITY, RASA MAKING OUT WITH HER MALE MODELS SEMI NUDE- MANY OF HER IMAGES IN THE HOLLYWOOD DAYS UP TO THE PRESENT TIME, SEXY, PROVOCATIVE & DARING-THE BOOK IS BEAUTIFUL, INFORMATIVE, CHALLENGING & CONTROVERSIAL-IT RAISES QUESTIONS & BRINGS NEW IDEAS & OLD IDEAS IN NEW WAYS-IT IS ANTI PRUDISHNESS & REPRESSION-IT IS PRO WOMEN'S SEXUAL FREEDOM, PRO COUGAR, PRO GAY, PRO LOVE, PRO MOTHER GOD, PRO FEMINISM & THE ASCENSION OF WOMEN TO THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE AS LEADERS.

Explores the question of how women craft meaningful "belonging" to national, regional, and global communities when belonging as a citizen becomes untenable. Evaluates the rhetorical practices that enable alternative belongings, such as denizenship, cosmopolitan nationalism, and transnational connectivity.

In How to Belong, Belinda Stillion Southard examines how women leaders throughout the world have asserted their rhetorical agency in troubling economic, social, and political conditions. Rather than utilizing the concept of citizenship to bolster political influence, the women in the case studies presented here rely on the power of relationships to create a more habitable world. With the rise of global capitalism, many nation-states that have profited from invigorated flows of capital have also responded to the threat of increased human mobility by heightening national citizenship’s exclusionary power. Through a series of case studies that include women grassroots protesters, a woman president, and a woman United Nations director, Stillion Southard analyzes several examples of women, all as embodied subjects in a particular transnational context, pushing back against this often violent rise in nationalist rhetoric. While scholars have typically used the concept of citizenship to explain what it means to belong, Stillion Southard instead shows how these women have reimagined belonging in ways that have enabled them to create national, regional, and global communities. As part of a broader conversation centered on exposing the violence of national citizenship and proposing ways of rejecting that violence, this book seeks to provide answers through the powerful rhetorical practices of resilient and inspiring women who have successfully negotiated what it means to belong, to be included, and to enact change beyond the boundaries of citizenship.